Dutch designer Ted Noten worked together with Freedom Of Creation to create the latest Design Academy Trophy. Each year an artist is commissioned by the Design Academy to design a trophy for the newly graduated students.

For the 2010 edition Ted came to FOC to create the Pig Head Trophy. By design, each slice of the pig head represented one graduate, not only was each and every slice different, they were also customized to show which course the student took.

Ted’s design work is internationally recognized for its ingenuity, which requires a certain flexibility and craftsmanship from the people he works with. It’s for this reason that Ted chooses to work with Freedom Of Creation, and thus with 3D printing technologies.

In a way the tools on the computer are becoming the new tools Ted works with. In the past artists worked with sculptors and goldsmiths, now all these crafts are coming together on the computer.

FOC exhibits during the Fabrication Laboratory exhibition at the Design Museum in Barcelona. This exhibition tells the story of the fundaments of 3D printed designs and explains the public about what kind of an impact this will have in the way products are created and put in the market in the future.

The exhibition already started in the summer 2010, but will last until 29.5.2011. For more info about opening times please follow this link.

In the fourth assignment, Talents are challenged to come up with an end-product application and design for ‘Paper Rapid Prototyping’ (PRP).

PRP technology is at the moment only used for prototyping purposes and does not offer the same design freedom and strength as for example Laser Sintered (SLS) Polyamide. But with a significantly lower build material cost price, it can be up to 25 times cheaper than SLS. The paper printer that FOC uses is called Mcor matrix (WIRED publication). FOC has always tried to push the Rapid Manufacturing (RM) envelope, but has not yet explored the PRP opportunities fully. READ ON

Right after his graduation from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, Janne Kyttanen founded Freedom Of Creation (FOC) in Helsinki, June 2000. The plan was bold: Start a company which would change the way all products were produced. Ship only data around the world in the form of 3D files and produce all products locally through 3D printing technologies…and do this with no investments, just sit behind the computer and work from the sofa …erhm..right:-)

“If I would have known what I was really getting into, I probably would have made different plans. But then again, the most valuable lesson I learned from my shrink is that there is no other way to learn except by doing. So making different plans would probably not have worked out anyway. Since I am a designer, the first 10 years has been a “learn from hard knocks” about all aspects needed to run a company and about what kind of people will contribute to the company’s success… Especially when creating something nobody has ever done before and that the market is not directly requesting. In the short term, it made absolutely no business sense to begin what we started. The running joke inside FOC is that 10 years ago we were 20 years too early. Regardless of the lack of any logic based on the traditional business manufacturing model, the foundation of the company ran purely on the passion to create a global design platform from which all creative freedoms that your heart could desire would become a reality. READ ON